Winner of the Rockower Award, the highest honor in Jewish journalism, this blog contains random musings of a journalist, father, husband, son, friend, poodle-owner, Red Sox fan and occasionally-ranting rabbi, taken from Shabbat-O-Grams, columns, speeches, letters, sermons and thin air. "On One Foot," the column, appears regularly in the New York Jewish Week, as well as a blog for the "Times of Israel."

And with Halloween this coming week, check
out what rabbis from different denominations have to say about trick or
treating, as well as this
interesting perspective on whether it is appropriate for Jews to observe a
holiday that worships death rather than celebrating life. Good point, but it’s time to lighten up,
folks. I don’t think the little kid
dressing as Superman (created by Jews) is really glorifying death. Since it falls on a Hebrew School day, our
kids here will be learning about Jewish superstitions and attitudes toward the
occult – and having lots of fun while doing it! And on Shabbat morning,
this timely topic will be discussed along with the portion Hayye Sarah (where
Sarah dies) focusing on the Jewish view on reincarnation.

Join us this evening at 7:30 for Kabbalat Shabbat and
tomorrow morning, when we’ll have a variety of children’s programs going on and
at the end, we’ll all celebrate together our October birthdays – it’s a new
thing we’re doing called Shabbirthday.
Yes,there will be cake, but we also have a special treat for the
birthday kids who show: Jewish Rainbow Loom Bracelets. Speaking of
which…

Are Rainbow Looms Kosher?

Rainbow Looms are
the latest mega-fad among American kids, in particular middle
schoolers. A direct line can be drawn from prior wrist-borne fads,
like Silly
Bandz (and their Jewish equivalent, Meshugabands)
and, going way back, the Slap
Bracelets of the ’90s. On a broader level, they continue a
tradition of fad-dom tracing back to the hula-hoop and the pet rock. But
unlike the prior fads, in this case the kids not only wear them, they make
them, and they give them away to friends and sell them for charity. A
more wholesome fad can not be found.

Strangely, these wholesome projects have spurred
controversy, despite the fact that they miraculously divert kids from video
games and their incessant texting. The bracelets have been banned
from some NYC schools, apparently because they have generated playground
antics and have distracted some kids from their studies.

I believe that Rainbow Looms are 100 percent
Kosher, even though some rabbinical authorities have cautioned
against them. The craze has hit Orthodox yeshivot
in the Five Towns, where rabbis are cautioning parents not to allow their
children to weave them on Shabbat. There do appear some clear
violations of Sabbath laws involved in this process (weaving itself is an
explicit one), but the authorities there go too far in stating that decorative
bracelets should be banned for boys because they are “simlat isha,”
women’s clothing, tantamount to wearing a dress. I’m sorry, but I
wear a rainbow loom bracelet and no one has ever confused it with a dress.
A colorful pantsuit perhaps, but a dress?

This kind of kill-joy attitude among educators has
happened before, with both Slap Bracelets and Silly Bandz. Educators
seem to have an unlimited capacity to shoot themselves in the
foot. The question rabbis ask should not be whether they are kosher,
but how can these accessories make Judaism look cool? Any fad will
do, in that regard, as long as it doesn’t involve permanent bodily mutilation.

Where some see a threat, I see an opportunity. Here’s yet
another chance to reach middle schoolers where they’re at — and anyone who
deals nonstop with bar mitzvah students craves a chance to hitch our wagon to
the latest fad. Under my tutelage, students have written memorable bar mitzvah
speeches about teeny bopper vampires, Mr. Spock’s Vulcan Greeting, Krusty the
Clown’s bar mitzvah and all things Pokémon.

As fads go Rainbow Looms are a natural for Jewish
educators. For one thing, they inspire acts of tzedakkah. We have
several b’nai mitzvah students who are making and selling these bracelets, then
donating the proceeds to various charities.

Hey, we practically invented the rainbow, or at least
the Torah
did a good job of co opting its symbolism (kudos to its Author, who
clearly had an instinct for Jewish education). The rainbow appears
throughout our ancient sources, beginning with the Noah story, where it is a
symbol of God’s faithfulness to the covenant and concern for the future of the
earth and humankind. There is a blessing for when we see a
rainbow: (Berachot 59a) “Blessed art You, Adonai our God,
Sovereign of the universe, who remembers the covenant, is faithful to it and
keeps Her word.” In Kabbalah, the rainbow’s colors represent the various shades
of God’s emanations (the Sefirot).

Sandy Hook Elementary School’s demolition begins today. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s right
that they are dismantling it without use of a wrecking ball. It’s just one more step in a town’s desire to
respectfully move on.

Last week I
wrote about my visit to Newtown High School at the invitation of a
congregant in her late 20s who was speaking to freshmen of her struggles with
alcoholism and addiction. I focused on Rachael’s moving presentation and
on the importance of bringing these issues out into the open.

In part two, I want to share some reflections on my first
visit to Newtown since the catastrophe.

Until now I had avoided going there, wishing to respect
the privacy of the grieving Newtowners. But Rachael’s invitation gave me
the chance, to begin to understand whether the people of Newtown, like Rachael
herself, have begun to move on from their own hellish nightmare.

I took the back roads of Fairfield County, avoiding the
rush hour traffic on the Merritt Parkway. With the foliage near peak,
each twist and turn was lovelier than the last, a portrait of New England
picket fence perfection. The trees were blazing in oranges and reds; the pumpkins,
the Indian corn, the crispy leaves lining the driveways and surrounding
mailboxes: all as deceptively peaceful as last December’s
snow. My GPS led me through Redding and Bethel and on to
Newtown, and then to the High School, located in Sandy Hook.

I so wanted it all to feel normal. And there was
normalcy to be found: football games, pizza places, banners for October
festivals, Halloween decorations everywhere. The High School looks like
any other high school - even the enhanced security is now typical of all
schools (though here I made a bee-line for the security desk to let them know
that this strange person with the beanie is actually the rabbi of one of the
presenters).

Even this program was strangely normal. Every high
school has (or should have) an evening where the police, lawyers, social
workers, doctors, MADD parents and
survivors of addiction assemble before the freshman class to collectively scare
the bejeebers out of them before they ruin their lives and the lives of
everyone they know. It’s a rite of passage. Teen drinking is an
enormous problem, don’t get me wrong. But it seemed in a strange way
comforting to be at a program about kids and drinking, with the obligatory
power point slides of crushed cars and bloody faces, with the scary statistics,
with the talk about parents serving time for allowing their kids to host
underage drinking parties, of date rape and endless vomiting - of teenage lives
tragically cut short. All of that appeared normal, sitting
in a room in Sandy Hook.

These kids need to be shocked into awareness - for
sure. But the program is part of the expected pattern of ninth grade
first semester. It comes with the acne.

And in Newtown, anything normal is by definition
comforting. It reestablishes the patterns of life so life can go
on. It’s like gorging on platters of food during shiva or the imbibing
that takes place at a wake.

So here we were, watching slides of horrific drunk
driving accidents and in comparison to what they have seen with their own eyes,
even these horrors seemed so prosaic, so commonplace. The banality of
teen tragedy. This was a program about the needless suffering and
death that every community suffers. Not the horrors that
only one community has ever seen.

At one point, a policeman suggested that the teens should
be especially careful to act responsibly “because the whole world knows where
Newtown is.” At first it seemed to me an unnecessary burden to place on teens
striving for a return to normalcy. But it occurred to me that even the
teens recognize that they will always be the subject of extra scrutiny and
curiosity, wherever they go. For most, I would guess, it is an emblem of
pride.

I sensed a great deal of love in the room. The
speakers who gave testimony, including Rachael and a young woman who had
attended the high school, all received prolonged standing ovations. Many
of the kids sat with parents rather than peers -no mean trick with teens - and
I could only imagine the swirling emotions of parents being reminded, as if
they needed a reminder, that children are vulnerable beings and that the
fragility persists well beyond first grade.

This was an emotional night for me. There is so
much suffering in this world and a disproportionate amount of it has been
allocated to this little corner of it. For the entire evening, I never
lost awareness that I was dwelling in the valley of the shadow of death.
This wasn’t an ordinary high school auditorium. This is the room, after
all, where the President wept. I wanted to hug everyone there, but felt
throughout like an intruder, a gawker, and that my hugs would only resurrect
the memories they are hoping to relegate to a lock box in the attic.

I’ve been to Columbine and I’ve been to Wounded
Knee. I’ve been to Boylston Street and to the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv
and Sbarro in Jerusalem. I’ve been to Ground Zero. I’ve been to
Auschwitz. I’ve frequented so many Vales of Tears. People
keep living in these places, they heroically try to move on; but on some level,
the tears never stop flowing. We never stop hearing the faint echoes of
the victims and the rat tat tator kaboom of the
instruments of death.

And now I’ve been to Newtown.

I drove back home to Stamford through the misty, rainy
night. I took the highway - too dark to see the foliage anymore. No
bucolic picket fences. No sparkling October sky. Just keeping my
thoughts inside the car, losing myself among the Red Sox’ double plays and Mike
Napoli’s mammoth clouts.

From Pew Will Come Forth
Torah

For those interested in a Jewish theological response to
the recent Pew survey of American Jewry, take a
look at Arthur Green’s essay, “From Pew Will Come Forth Torah.”Green understands the theological
underpinnings behind the numbers, explains the seismic change that has been
happening in the context of living in a post-Holocaust world.He states:

Jewish belief in God, already deeply challenged by
modernity and our embrace of Western education, was shattered by the Holocaust,
a memory still at the top of Pew’s list of Jewish identity markers. If being a
Jew means remembering the terrible events of the Holocaust years, it at the
same moment challenges our faith in a God who rules history with a special
concern for His beloved people….

The Holocaust challenge is joined by the results of
two other great battles that traditional religion fought and lost across the
twentieth century. One was the struggle against “Darwin,” or the entire
scientific narrative of earth’s origins and the evolution of humanity. The
other was the ongoing debate over Biblical authorship and the triumph of a
critical perspective showing that religion itself, including its most sacred
texts, was a product of an evolving history. Is it any wonder that a third of
young Jews see themselves as “without religion?” Perhaps our eyes of wonder
should be turned in the other direction. “What a marvel that two-thirds of
Jewry still see themselves as religious, as maintaining their faith in the face
of all that! How rich and profound that faith must be!” Would that this were
true. But I fear that for many of those still on the “Jewish by religion” side
of the divide in Pew’s questionaire, the definer is loyalty or nostalgia rather
than deep faith. Their children as well, I fear, will soon fall into the other
camp.

Green, an advocate of neo-hasidism, sees a revival of
Jewish piety coming not from a God of reason, a “commanding Other who rules
over history,” but rather the “still, small voice from within that calls upon
us to open our hearts and turn our lives toward goodness, even in the face of
terrible human evil and the inexplicable reality of nature’s indifference to
our individual human plight.”

It’s a provocative and well-written summation of Green’s
influential views, a challenge to many Conservative and Orthodox Jews and a
succinct preamble of much of TBE’s vision (and my own). Definitely worth a read.